INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana students lost nearly six months of learning in math and over four months in reading as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new research from Harvard and Stanford universities.
The new Education Recovery Scorecard recently released offers the first comparable view of district-level learning loss that occurred in Indiana between 2019 and 2022.
An interactive map shows that data varies widely for individual districts, with some losses amounting to almost an entire year in math. Research also further confirms the pandemic widened disparities in achievement between high- and low-poverty schools.
The results underscore continued concerns expressed by Hoosier lawmakers and state education officials about learning loss, especially among some of the state’s youngest students. Last year’s IREAD scores showed roughly one in five Hoosier third graders can’t read proficiently.
Other Spring 2022 tests revealed that 30.2% of Hoosier students in grades 3-8 passed both the math and English sections of ILEARN. While the standardized test results were a slight increase compared to 2021, passing scores trailed eight percentage points behind 2019′s pre-pandemic pass rates.
Harvard and Stanford’s research indicated that the median U.S. public school students in grades 3-8 lost about a half-year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading. That means that in Spring 2022, students were about six months behind students in the same grade in Spring 2019.
Nationally, 8% of students were in districts that lost more than a year of learning in math, while 3% were in districts where math achievement actually rose.
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